Fortunately, however, since several members of the panel lived or worked in New York and had convened for regular discussions over the several years of the panel's life a group of experienced observers of the epidemic, the panel was able to complete one of its planned empirical studies, that of New York City. Unfortunately, it proved logistically and financially difficult to carry out this plan. Our plan had been to focus on three cities, New York, Miami, and Sacramento, to determine the epidemic's impacts in places with quite different social, cultural, and demographic characteristics. The panel planned to study in some detail the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in several locales as part of an effort to understand the localized dimensions of the epidemic.
